Tuesday, December 31st, 2013
A version of this article appeared on the
Beeminder Blog. This
is the rest of the story, about how Beeminder bet $1000 on
bettering Beeminder every day, then failed and had to actually
cough up the $1000 to a lucky user. But only after making 1000
improvements in 1000 days...
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Tags: akrasia,
beeminder,
commitment devices,
rationality,
startups
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12 Comments »
Saturday, November 30th, 2013
In his provocative
TED talk
and bestselling
book, the progressive internet activist
Eli Pariser
tells the story of how one day he noticed that the Facebook posts
from his politically conservative friends began disappearing from
his newsfeed. Pariser traces this phenomenon back to
Facebook’s recommendation algorithms, which looked at the
links he clicked, effectively...
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Tags: Facebook,
politics,
social networks
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4 Comments »
Thursday, October 31st, 2013
I introduced the social currency (or
scrip) Yootles in
2006 with the (needless to say, quixotic) goal of changing the
social norms about money. We had two specific reasons for an
alternative currency: We wanted to run prediction markets and
needed a way around anti-gambling laws in the US Many people find
the idea of using money...
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Tags: economics,
mechanism design,
prediction,
psychology,
yahoo,
yootles
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1 Comment »
Monday, September 30th, 2013
During the 1936 U.S. presidential campaign, the popular magazine
Literary Digest conducted a mail-in election poll that attracted
over two million responses, a huge sample even by today’s
standards. Unfortunately for them, size isn’t the only thing
that matters. Literary Digest notoriously and erroneously
predicted a landslide victory for Republican candidate Alf Landon.
In reality,...
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Tags: elections,
forecasting,
xbox
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2 Comments »
Tuesday, August 27th, 2013
I’ve been wearing Google glasses
every day for almost three months
now. If you’re excited enough about Google Glass to be
reading yet another review of them then I shall proceed to burst
your bubble. But I’ll start with the good parts! These
things are super light, comfortable, and indestructible.
They’ve survived significant rain a couple...
»
Tags: ai,
augmented reality,
gadgets,
google,
privacy,
robots
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15 Comments »